[size=200]What the Jewish Holocaust has to teach us about Humankind
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Imagine that you were living with your family in a very poor city in Poland or Austria or Deutschland. Imagine that your family had Jewish roots, but you had no particular interest in Jewish religion or culture. You observed the Sabbath and you observed the havdalas, but only for cultural solidarity. You were not inherently religious, and you didn’t even believe that Moses had really received revelations from god. So, you were related to the Jewish people (that is a very proud, worthy and admirable people), but you didn’t give a damn to that, you lived your life with your family, you respected the laws and costumes of the land you were living in and you were a working and honest citizen.
Imagine now that suddenly your life is violated, without any reason it is violated, the city you live in (where the majority of the population is composed by Jews) suddenly becomes a “security area”, as if all of you were…sick. You don’t know which is your sickness, but all the happenings seems to indicate that you suffer from a terrible disease. Are you a leper? Do you have a rare disease? Are you a man (a trully worthy man) and that makes your fellow men unhappy? You don’t know. Everything seems to indicate that it doesn’t matter why. You’d already heard about things like that: persecution, ghettos, always the same insane persecution. Suddenly everybody seems to become crazy. Men start to talk alone, women start to shout desperately on the streets. You don’t know exactly what is happening, but somewhere in your soul you know that it is something really bad.
Now imagine that some time has passed. You are no longer living with your family in that poor little city. You can’t see things very clear but they took your famliy from you. Where are they? Your son (who was almost sixteen) planned to travel to Berlin in order to become a doctor. Where is he? Where is his dream now? Suddenly you see many strange people trying to help you. You notice that some time ago other people were hurting you and violating you so profoundly, that you can still feel the pain. You look at their faces…are they different from the people that had killed your family and humiliated you so much? No, you don’t believe in that. They are not different from them. They wear convincent masks. Now things are becoming clearer. You will soon be able to see the truth perfectly…o but what a truth! After knowing that truth you’ll realize that there is nothing more worth knowing…
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Sometime ago I used to be a very proud man. I was proud of my “knowledge”, I was proud of “being alive” and I was proud of “having a nice family”. Today I am not proud animore, I am not proud of anything. Because I have finally realized things that I couldn’t realize when I was younger. When I first read Leon Uris’s Exodus and Appelfeld 's Badenheim 1939 I wasn’t much impressed by all the sadness (the profound sadness) which impregnated those books, but later I become very depressed. I couldn’t explain why I was so depressed (those people were not “like me”, they were “all dead”, they “would look down on me”, and so on) but I couldn’t read any book during a long time. Because those books have taught me something I DIDN’T WANT TO KNOW. About me. About humankind. About us. But I plainly realized that only when I read them (and other books) later, when I was older (20,21) and could see things clearly.
The lesson these books have taught me is that IT IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE TO LIVE A REALLY WORTHY LIFE IN THIS WORLD. It doesn’t matter how much you try, how much you deceive yourself, we can’t simply hide our faces and pretend that those things didn’t happen. For the crime of having being born different (“inferior” in the ridiculous language of “trully superior people”) innocent people were killed, raped, tortured…all absolutely in vain. With no purpose, no reason. I’ve already tried to convince myself that what happened in Germany during the last World War was just a creation of sick and creative minds. But that’s not true. Because I know that that hate (the hate that had made so many people suffer IN VAIN) is still here. It is with us everyday. It is in our eyes, in our words, in our thoughts. Every single time we hear about a “special” kind of people (“superior”, “talented”," better", call them as you will) we’re hearing something about the same kind of hate that created the gas chambers…
It is easy for some of you simply answer me saying: o can’t you see that German people do feel guilty because of what happened in their land? No, I can’t. Because “feeling guilty” is not enough. Feeling guilty doesn’t bring defenseless people back. Feeling guilty is not different from feeling indifferent. There’s no forgiveness. There’s no explanation. There’s no reason. There are only memories, sad, depressive memories of millions of people shouting, begging help, being COMPLETELY AND DEFINITELY violated…in vain. For our “land”, for our “flag” for our “dignity” and our “race” we can do anything we want, we can become monsters. After our enemies (who were indeed better than us) are dead, we can simply “regret” what we had done and become “human” again. That is what had happened with Germaan people. Not only with them. Religious and nationalist hatred is still in the saddle in Europe. This fucking childish “anti-semitism” never dies. A Jew will never, never feel like a real part of this world, because some people let it clear that they don’t belong to our world. “They are inferior to us”, some say. The true meaning of this sentence is: “They are indeed superior to us. Incredibly superior”.
It is easy for us to think that the past is the past. Ok. If what happened in Germany were really a unique event in the history of humankind, that would be right. But that’s not true. There were many events like it in “our” history. What’s the difference between Jewish Holocaust and nigger slavery? What’s the difference between Jewish Holocaust and indian massacres? What was the reason behind all this dirt? “Nationalism”? “Race”?“Civilization”? “Religion”? No. Hate. Purely human hate. That’s all. That’s the reason behind all our acts: hate toward what is different from us. This hate killed the Jews, this hate killed the American indians and this hate killed the “heretics” at the Catholic stakes. That is man. Man is that. Man is just that.
I have stated that it is impossible to live a really worthy life in this world. Maybe you haven’t understood why. It is simple: before facts like the Jewish Holocaust, all the truth about life is revealed: we think that we’re “free” in society, that we “control” our lifes, but that is not true. The man who is helping you today is your ennemy tomorrow. You become sad when you see Holocaust images, but you never stop to think that you could be one of those monsters. For the sake of “nation”, “race” or “true religion”, a man can do an unbelievable harm and not feel guilty for that. Man can be controlled by anything. Those monsters who had killed the jews are not completely dead. They’re among us. Maybe they are our neighbours. Maybe they are ouselves.
And not only they are not completely dead. Their victims are also alive. They’re here with us. Still crying, still begging help, still becoming slowly insane (like Appelfeld’s characters). They are looking at us and telling us something we don’t want to know. They are telling us with their scaring faces not to believe in anything, and mainly not to believe in man.
“Man is that”, they are crying…
“Man is just that.”